Diary

· Consternation barely does justice to the force of the Diary's emotions on learning, from no less an authority than the Mirror, that in Gordon Brown's family home in Scotland this weekend the bathroom ceiling fell in. What, we wonder, can have happened? A veritable string of calls to the chancellor's aides fails, sadly, to elicit an explanation (or indeed a confirmation), but we find it hard to imagine that in a household so renowned for its parsimony someone could have been quite so thoughtless as to have left a tap running.

· Harsh words, we feel, from Workers' Power - the British section (as we feel sure you knew) of the League for the Fifth International - for George Galloway's undeniably sparkling performance on Celebrity Big Brother. Revealing that the member for Bethnal Green and Bow failed inexplicably to turn up last weekend for a meeting of the national council of Respect, the coalition he represents in the House of Commons, Workers' Power cruelly accused the MP of "lining up a series of chat shows and other TV appearances" rather than face the wrath of his (soon-to-be erstwhile) comrades. Mr Galloway's "egotism", "careerism" and "opportunism" had led to a "fiasco" that had seriously wounded the coalition, the group warned, while "mock miaowing and references to pink leotards" now threaten to "obliterate any anti-imperialist message" the unfortunate member tries to make in future. Fortunately, salvation is at hand. "Revolutionary socialists have tried and trusted ways of dealing with these problems," Workers' Power warns a tad ominously. "We insist on accountability, discipline, but above all on absolute loyalty to the party's programme and principles." That's you told, George.

· (The following item carries a Rude Word Warning, although we have replaced most of the offending letters with asterisks to ensure they are easy to identify.) Hanif Kureishi's Observer chat with Amir Khan, Olympic silver medallist and (it says here) future of British boxing was an enthralling and instructive read. But if the Diary is delighted that the internationally acclaimed writer had no difficulty gaining access to the publicity-shy 19-year-old, we are reluctantly obliged to point out that gaining access to Mr Kureishi is not always so easy. Our attention is drawn to an entertaining, if rather fruity, exchange of mails between the award-winning wordsmith and a French journalist, whose polite request for the briefest of interviews on "the political situation in Britain and the current debate on multiculturalism" was met with a curt invitation to contact Mr Kureishi's agent with a view to purchasing one of two pieces he had recently published on the subject. When the unfortunate hack dared insist that what she was after, if he could possibly spare the time, was a few minutes of face-to-face, our honey-tongued hero replied: "You are extremely rude and impertinent. You can f*** off, c***" (those were the Rude Words, by the way). When we tackle Mr Kureishi about this curious lapse in etiquette, he tells us he was furious with the French for "trying to get for free what everyone else had paid for". Thankfully, Hanif, aspiring young boxers seem not to have the same qualms.

· There is, it seems, no end to the excitement at the London Middle East Institute of the School of Oriental and African Studies, where tomorrow evening's long-scheduled and keenly awaited talk on Urban Rehabilitation in Tripoli has, for reasons as yet unclear, been replaced with a lecture entitled Breastfeeding Women in the Art of Medieval Iran (we did not make that up).

· Returning, briefly, to France, we are pleased to learn from a probing study on the occasion of the International Lingerie Fair that the market in men's underwear is, as it were, bulging, with a record 46 manufacturers displaying their never-less-than-tasteful (which is more than can be said for the Diary) wares against a mere 24 last year. Putting this important news in perspective, however, the French Lingerie Federation noted that the average Gallic male still spent just €18.10 on his drawers last year, compared with €122 spent by the average French woman. And that is all we have room for on this item.